[notahacker]

I think we're probably talking different orders of magnitude and decision-making levels here.

Boards are very happy demonstrating a desire to achieve strategic change over the long term by making large capital investments. They have authority over the management accountants who can create a special budget for those exceptional items (and amortise capex over a long period of time), access to external finance if they need it, and responsibility for deciding exactly what their targeted return on that investment is and when its forecast to happen (sometimes after the fact...)

Much of the operational expenditure comes out of the budget of the responsible department which has annually or quarterly targets the Board has set for it based on existing recurring costs and revenues, so any new items of expenditure had best yield revenue pretty quickly or else cut costs in other areas. Of course, if that department truly believes there will be a longer term payoff they can always go to the Board...